GitHub Actions auto-approve not working on pull request created by GitHub Actions bot

Question

I am using two workflows inside my GitHub repository.

The first workflow gets triggered by every push on dev and bumps up the version inside a new branch bump-version and create a new pull request to dev.

name: bump-version
on: 
  push:
    branches:
      - 'dev'

jobs:
  bumpVersionNumber:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 10
      - run: npm ci

      - name: Bump Version
        run: |
          git config --local user.email "[email protected]"
          git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"
          npm run release

      - name: Create Pull Request
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v4
        with:
          commit-message: bump version
          title: Bump version
          body: Bump version to reflect release changes
          branch: bump-version
          base: dev

The second workflow should get triggered by every push and pull request to the newly created branch bump-version:

name: auto-approve
on: 
  push:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - 'bump-version'

jobs:
  autoApprove:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 10
      - run: npm ci
         
      - name: Pull request number
        run: |
          echo "Pull Request Number - ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}"

      - name: Approve pull Request
        if: ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}
        uses: hmarr/auto-approve-action@v2
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          pull-request-number: ${{ github.event.pull_request.number }}

The problem is that the second workflow auto-approve does not get triggered, when the new pull request is created or there is a push on the branch by the first workflow bump-version.

I would like to know why the second workflow auto-approve gets triggered by push on any branch but not the bump-version branch and why it's not getting triggered when a new pull request is being created from the branch bump-version to dev?

Does it has to do something with the fact that the pull request is being created by GitHub Actions bot?

Answer 1

By default, when you use the repository's GITHUB_TOKEN to perform tasks, events triggered by the GITHUB_TOKEN will not create a new workflow run. This prevents you from accidentally creating recursive workflow runs.

If you do want to trigger a workflow from within a workflow run, you can use a personal access token instead of the GITHUB_TOKEN to trigger events that require a token.

Here, you would have to use this PAT when calling the peter-evans/create-pull-request action:

      - name: Create Pull Request
        uses: peter-evans/create-pull-request@v4
        with:
          commit-message: bump version
          title: Bump version
          body: Bump version to reflect release changes
          branch: bump-version
          base: dev
          token: ${{ secrets.PAT }}